A Sweet Scent of Death

by Guillermo Arriaga

  ‘Wouldn’t you like a cup of coffee?’ she asked.

  The two men came in and sat down at the table. Clotilde opened the bag and emptied its contents onto a platter: six tacos of scrambled eggs with potatoes and onions. Not in the least bit hungry, Natalio forced himself to eat one for the sake of appearances. The rest were devoured by the strangers, on the pretext of filling their stomachs to counteract the effects of all the beer they had been drinking.

  Neither mentioned the crime. They spent their time talking to each other about how many sheep they had lost to coyotes, the dates of the next dances to be held at Xico, the elections for a new ejido delegate and the level of the reservoir during the dry season. It was as if they had come to Natalio’s house for no other reason than to continue an ongoing conversation.

  Clotilde and Natalio listened patiently for an hour and a half, until one of the strangers decided it was time to go. Discouraged by the lack of information about the murderer in their dialogue, Natalio stood up to see them off.

  ‘Night,’ he said to them.

  ‘G’night,’ answered the more cordial of the two as he stood staring at Natalio.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Natalio anxiously.

  The other held back his answer for a moment or two.

  ‘Nothing. We only wanted to tell you that we know who killed your little girl.’

  Natalio shivered: ‘Who?’ he asked, trying to control his agitation.

  ‘A guy they call the Gypsy…’

  Seeing that Natalio showed no signs of recognition, the man added: ‘The one who drives a black Dodge.’

  Fury shook Natalio’s temples; he had no idea who they were talking about, but he would go and find him. All they had to do was tell him which way to go.

  ‘Where does he live?’

  The man smacked his lips. ‘You won’t find him around here…he’s not from these parts.’

  ‘He’s a mean son of a bitch, that Gypsy,’ added the other man. ‘He has debts pending in several settlements.’

  ‘Well I’m going to collect this one,’ declared Natalio, ‘because I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘No what?’ asked Natalio, stung.

  ‘You’ve already been beaten out,’ answered the man, ‘because a little while ago the guy who swore he would do it was Ramón Castaños.’

  ‘He has no obligation,’ declared Natalio.

  The man shook his head again. ‘The boy’s already sworn and he’ll look bad if he doesn’t keep his word… Besides he is obliged because he was going to marry your daughter.’

  The answer calmed the old man. If Ramón had committed to avenging Adela, he had to respect his decision.

  ‘The Gypsy took off right after,’ added the man, ‘but Ramón promised to get him.’

  ‘I’ll look him up after it’s done, to give him my thanks,’ said Natalio.

  4

  The first time the Gypsy had embraced her, Gabriela Bautista felt fear, not for what he had done to her, but for what she herself felt. The man had grabbed her around the waist, taking her by surprise, as she returned from feeding the goats in the corral behind her house. She had tried to get loose. Pedro, her husband, would soon be back in the truck that brought the cotton-pickers from the plantations at El Salado. The Gypsy had immobilized her with words, not force.

  ‘I’ll let you go if you want me to,’ he said.

  She stopped struggling. Their glances had met often enough for them both to understand that his embrace was no accident. Nevertheless, the place and the hour made his move untimely and dangerous. Gabriela had no desire to separate herself from the man who was holding her tightly, but she had no intention of causing a calamity. She found no better way to calm him, without rejecting him, than to go limp and roll her eyes skyward.

  The Gypsy was at a loss to interpret the woman’s pliancy as she slid from his arms. He reacted by tightening his grip. There was no change in her lack of resistance. Disappointed, he let her go, without realizing that beneath her coldness, Gabriela was hiding a desire that choked her.

  ‘I’d better leave,’ murmured the Gypsy, half annoyed, half embarrassed.

  With no change of expression, Gabriela said: ‘Don’t let me go.’

  Confused, the Gypsy turned and kissed her mouth. Automatically, Gabriela raised her hands and grasped the man’s torso. Under his shirt, soaked with perspiration, she could feel the rippled scars covering his back. She became even more excited. His furrowed back felt overpoweringly virile. She tensed, licked his bitter mouth and pushed him away.

  ‘Go away,’ she commanded.

  Excited, the Gypsy tried to embrace her again, but Gabriela elbowed him away.

  ‘Get out of here,’ she repeated; ‘Pedro will be here any minute…come for me some other time.’

  The Gypsy left, satisfied Gabriela would not get away from him again. She remained standing in the middle of the lot, feeling humid heat unleashed between her legs.

  That night she had not been able to stop thinking of his scar-furrowed back, just as she was unable to stop thinking of it two years later, the night Pedro revealed to her that the Gypsy had murdered Adela Figueroa. Only this time she imagined it differently, not as the back that had trembled with passion on top of her, but as the back of a man who would be pursued until they had killed him. That was her nightmare: that they would cut him down from the back, since it would be the only way they could kill him. No one would dare to meet him face to face.

  There was no way the Gypsy could have committed the crime of which he was accused. Only she knew that, for sure, and only she could prove his innocence. But to confess the truth would expose herself to exchanging her life for his. She was afraid and thought there was nothing she could do to save him, nothing at all. She curled up in the sheets and sobbed. She remembered his back again, the hours they had spent together and the tremendous desire to be with him. She had never thought her secret would be so painful. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep in the clamminess of the night.

  5

  Justino Téllez tossed and turned on his bed and opened his eyes again. His head was spinning—not from the countless splits of Victoria beer he had drunk, not from hours of insomnia during a night soaked in mosquitoes and humid heat, not from so much involvement with the murder, but from a vague idea stuck in his conscience which kept him from sleeping.

  He had no reason to be so concerned. The crime had been solved. Besides Ranulfo Quirarte’s testimony, there had been other versions of the Gypsy’s behavior confirming his guilt. Torcuato Garduño remembered seeing him hanging around Adela’s house several times in the early morning. Macedonio Macedo declared he had seen him sharpening a knife identical to the one stolen from Lucio Estrada. Pascual Ortega reported the lewd compliments the Gypsy aimed at Adela, to which she had responded with utter indifference. Juan Carrera heard him talk about the tremendous jealousy he felt for a woman in the village with whom he said he was in love and whose name he never mentioned, and Pedro Salgado had noticed the Gypsy behaving strangely for some time. Everything pointed to the Gypsy as the killer.

  It was almost nine in the morning and Justino, who had dropped on his bed at five, still couldn’t sleep. Something didn’t fit, a vague detail that was out of place, that pricked his insomnia and that Justino, befuddled by the alcohol he had consumed, was unable to place.

  He thrashed about between his sheets for a long time, trying unsuccessfully to doze off. ‘Shit,’ he thought, ‘what the hell is wrong with me?’ A bitter taste burned his throat and tongue. He was on the verge of collapse from exhaustion, but the damned idea that left him sleepless refused to take shape. If his wife had been alive, she would have prescribed a remedy for his condition, but he was a widower and there was no one in the house to advise him.

  He got up disjointedly and staggered over to a basket he used as a pantry. Fumbling around in search of something that would calm him down, he pulled out a jar of in
stant coffee, a can of powdered milk, some packaged tamales, a piece of dried horse meat, tomatoes, green chiles, until he finally found what he needed: ebony seeds.

  He put them on the stove to boil. When the water began to turn reddish, he removed the pan and added two spoons of powdered milk. He drank the infusion bit by bit until there was none left, and then returned to the bed. The potion took effect and Justino began to doze. The idea hammering at his brain, though still confused, came to mind from time to time, but no longer made any difference; drowsiness was overtaking him.

  He was almost asleep when suddenly an image that made everything clear took shape: a footprint one span and three fingers long, the murderer’s footprint. The Gypsy’s foot measured at least two fingers more. That was what was spinning around in his head and the last thing that came to mind before he fell into a deep sleep.

  Chapter X

  Love Letters

  1

  Finally, after a long struggle, Ramón Castaños came up with the exact word to express the chaos piling up inside him since the previous day.

  ‘Check,’ he murmured.

  Torcuato Garduño and Jacinto Cruz, each lost in his own drunken monologue, raised their heads at the same time.

  ‘Wha…?’ asked Torcuato, slurring the vowel.

  ‘Nothing,’ answered Ramón.

  The others looked at him with glassy eyes and went back to their mumbling. Ramón repeated to himself: ‘Check,’ this time in such a quiet whisper that no one heard him.

  He had no real idea of what ‘check’ meant; nevertheless, he had read in a cowboy story that the hero, surrounded by a tribe of Apaches, yelled to his buddies: ‘They’ve got us in check.’ Ramón couldn’t remember the end of the plot, but he retained the word that expressed the dire situation of its characters, and from then on he used it for his own troubles.

  ‘I’m in check,’ he thought gravely, imagining himself a cowboy surrounded by Apaches. But he was much deeper in check when, at seven in the morning, still standing behind his counter, having had no sleep and being obliged to put up with the stupidity of a pair of drunks, his psyche perturbed by a love affair with a corpse he was obliged to avenge, he saw Natalio Figueroa approaching the store.

  His attempt to take refuge beside the shelves and remain unnoticed so that the old man would pass him by was in vain, because at that hour of the morning Natalio was looking precisely for him.

  The old man reached the door of the shop and murmured a ‘G’morning’. Torcuato and Jacinto turned and, recognizing him, rose clumsily to their feet. Ramón, whose swollen eyes testified to the all-night binge, responded to the greeting with a timid nod. Natalio Figueroa, his hands in his pockets, slumped on a chair and began to examine the shelves as if he were undecided about what to buy.

  Torcuato and Jacinto sat down again. To Ramón, Natalio seemed more aged than the previous day, as if the old man would break in two at the slightest movement.

  Ramón had no wish to talk to him or to anyone else; all he could think of was bed and sleep for three days without interruption.

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’ asked Natalio, intending to take him home for breakfast so that he could talk to him alone.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Ramón with assurance.

  Torcuato Garduño stared at him dully. ‘When did you do that? You’ve been here all night,’ he dragged out with great effort.

  Ramón pointed to some shelves loaded with packaged junk food. ‘I’ve been snacking and I’m not hungry any more,’ he lied, because in fact his stomach was growling. He had eaten only some corn chips and a couple of Twinkies, but he was anxious to get rid of Natalio and the two drunks as soon as possible. He didn’t want to talk or stand on his feet or go over Adela’s death again. He had had enough.

  Natalio realized that the boy was tired and fed up, but he badly needed to see him.

  ‘My wife made some fish tamales and told me to invite you,’ added Natalio, convinced that Ramón would not refuse such a direct proposal.

  Ramón came around the counter, asked Torcuato and Jacinto to give up their chairs and put them in the back of the store along with the tables. Then he closed the door and tied a rope through the two rings. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he shouted to his mother, said goodbye to the two night-owls with a ‘See you later’, and then ‘OK, let’s go’, to the old man.

  2

  On the way to the Figueroa home, Ramón began to feel sick. Not only because he was going back to the room still bathed in the smell of Adela dead, but because at every step beside Natalio he imagined that it was Adela walking next to him. Both had the same look, similar gestures and even a similar gait. The cicadas were chirping and the sun broiling as they had the previous morning when he had touched Adela’s tepid skin. It was thus that Adela materialized, step by step: smiling in her father’s smile, breathing in his breath, walking in his steps. Ramón, who had never heard more than two sentences from her, heard her joking, crying, laughing. He stopped to rest in the middle of the street, closed his eyes and massaged the nape of his neck. Instead of disappearing, the spectral image of Adela grew within him. It grew so far as to make him turn a look of desperation on the old man, who could only ask, ‘What’s the matter?’ Natalio’s grave voice broke the spell and Adela’s shade collapsed into the dust of the morning.

  ‘Nothing…nothing is the matter with me,’ answered Ramón with a tremulous sigh.

  Ramón walked into the house and smelled the familiar scent of roses that had been on Adela when he found her lying at the corner of the sorghum field. Clotilde Aranda had spread a few drops of the fragrance around to cover the traces of the corpse. The cloying floral aroma dizzied Ramón; Adela’s specter had slipped into him through his nostrils. He glimpsed her again on the cot, naked, smelling of roses, raising her arms to him. ‘It’s a dream…I’m tired,’ he thought and, resigned to suffering the dead girl’s omnipresence a little while longer, he left Adela lying on the cot and sat down to breakfast.

  Clotilde served the tamales with refried beans on the side and black coffee. Ramón ate swiftly, almost without raising his eyes from the plate. He was so absorbed in every mouthful that Natalio and Clotilde decided not to distract him, and munched their sorrow in silence. When they finished, Clotilde removed the plates, carefully cleaned the table, leaving nothing on it. Ceremoniously, Natalio stood up to get a cardboard box. He put it on his knees and took out a handful of papers from which he carefully withdrew one.

  ‘These are Adela’s marks from when she was in fifth grade,’ he said. He handed the yellowing sheet to Ramón. ‘She was good at studying…the teacher said she was the best in the school,’ continued Natalio with a barely noticeable expression of pride.

  Before looking at the multiple As and Bs in Spanish, Math, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Ramón looked at the photograph of Adela stapled to the top of the report card. It was a dull, wrinkled, black-and-white, three-quarter profile of the girl. She looked grave, her hair combed back, her forehead clear and her light-colored eyes focused in the distance.

  ‘She was thirteen in that photo,’ remarked Clotilde, ‘and she was the tallest in her class.’

  Ramón turned to face her, to ask a banal question, but the woman had stopped talking and paying attention to him. Something had crossed her mind, leaving a distant and childish grimace on her face. Ramón examined the picture again. Adela was not wearing earrings; nor was there any visible make-up on her lips or eyelashes. Around her neck hung a narrow chain lost in the folds of her blouse: a white blouse. Ramón wondered if the day she had been photographed she was wearing the yellow skirt. He could not imagine her dressed otherwise than she had been the afternoon he had met her.

  Natalio searched the box and took out another photograph, one in faded, washed-out colors, in which Adela was sitting in the center of an iron bench with a bandstand in the background.

  ‘This was the last picture taken of her,’ said the old man, his voice cracking. ‘It was a little before we
moved here.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Ramón.

  ‘That’s the main square of León, on Adela’s birthday,’ answered Clotilde.

  Ramón wanted to ask the date, but he didn’t dare. Adela smiled from the photograph, and Ramón had never seen her smile. Nor did he know her birthday.

  3

  Ramón’s morning was spent among photographs, locks of hair, report cards, broken dolls, Christmas cards and school medals. Clotilde and Natalio, more for themselves than for Ramón, were trying to recover their daughter amid these odds and ends.

  At first, Ramón listened with interest; breakfast had raised his spirits. But by midday he began to feel overcome with fatigue. The old folks’ stories bewildered him. Several times he asked for strong coffee, wanting to stave off the weight of his hangover and, at all costs, prevent Adela from materializing in her father’s face. Three times he tried to leave, but the old couple wrapped his departure in endless memories, making it impossible. On his fourth attempt, determined to leave, Natalio held him back with a ‘Wait a second.’ He went to the wardrobe and returned with a bundle of letters, which he placed on the table.

  ‘They’re yours,’ he said.

  Embarrassed, Ramón looked at the letters.

  ‘Mine, why?’

  ‘Adela wrote them to you,’ answered her father.

  Ramón, who in his anxiety to be gone was already standing, sat down again. Clotilde intervened.

  ‘Adela had already told us about you.’

  Ramón’s heart beat rapidly. There must be some mistake. He had really had nothing to do with her.

  The woman picked up the bundle of letters and put it in his hands. ‘Take them,’ she insisted softly. ‘They’re love letters.’

  Confused, Ramón tried to return them; but Clotilde rejected them firmly.

  ‘My daughter loved you, don’t reject her now that she’s dead,’ she said bitterly.